Bournville: From the bestselling author of Middle England

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Bournville is a quiet village in the heart of England famous for its chocolate. For eleven-year-old Mary, it is the center of her world, the place where most of her family’s friends and neighbors have worked for decades and where the streets smell faintly of chocolate. For all the novel's satirical tang and historical sweep, it's at root a tender portrait of apparently simple folk trying to fathom the mystery of their own personalities * Spectator *

As the latest in J Coe's Unrest sequence, Bournville is one of the most warm-hearted, brilliant and beguiling of his State of the Nation novels. To show three generations of an ordinary Midlands family, their paths taken and not taken, their friends, lovers, jobs, achievements and losses; to interweave this with 75 years of national history - and to do so with such a lightness of touch is a tremendous achievement. All the absurdities of our nation wrapped up in something as bitter, sweet, and addictive as a bar of the best Bournville chocolate Amanda Craig, author of The Golden Rule Coe himself has said in a recent interview that “the prose I write is very rarely poetic” and that he “regards it as a positive” that his books are easy to read – and without the inventiveness of “What A Carve Up” that straightforwardness is starker here and perhaps a little in contrast to much of the literary fiction I normally enjoy. The writing though does remain engaging and enjoyable. Parts of Bournville feel episodic, and the cast is so large that not every character can make an impression. However, these flaws are outweighed by the book’s many delights, particularly its involving storylines, comic set pieces and astute analysis. (...) This is a novel about people and place. Entertaining and often poignant, it presents a captivating portrait of how Britons lived then and the way they live now." - The Economist Bournville is a rich and poignant new novel from the bestselling, Costa award-winning author of Middle England. It is the story of a woman, of a nation's love affair with chocolate, of Britain itself.

There is much to enjoy here, as in all Coe's novels . . . an intelligent criticism of our shared history since 1945 Scotsman

Someone in a previous GR review of this book (Kay Dunham) described the style as similar to that of the Famous Five, this is exactly it. It does try your patience, though, to be treated like that as a reader: everything being spelled out for you, it makes you feel stupid at times. It will be another twenty-one years before the next Anglo-German episode occurs. Mary has married Geoffrey, Carl’s grandson, and they have three boys. Their German cousins visit England for the first time that we know of, to attend the World Cup in 1966, played in England. The Germans are confident that Germany will win, the English less confident that England will win. However there are clashes between the two sets of cousins not only over football but over the relative quality of their national chocolate and over the war, resulting in a fight. Disappointing stuff. I think this novel was trying to do way too much and as a result didn't end up achieving any of it. At heart Bournville is a novel designed to make you think by making you laugh, and the seriousness of the subject matter is tempered throughout by the author's piercing eye for the more ludicrous elements of human nature New Statesman Told with compassion, steadiness, decency and always a glint in the eye, this is a novel that both challenges and delights. For anyone who has felt lost in the past six years, it is like meeting an ally Rachel Joyce, author of Miss Benson's BeetleMany members of the Lamb family figure prominently and we follow quite a few life-stories, but the anchoring figure is Mary Lamb -- "based closely", Coe admits, on his own mother (while he claims there is no connection between his and the rest of the Lamb family). As with Johnson, Coe wanted to try to understand the appeal of a man with so many clearly questionable qualities: “Bond is racist, misogynist, egotistical.” Coe recently persuaded his two daughters, both in their early 20s and familiar only with Daniel Craig’s Bond, to watch For Your Eyes Only. They didn’t get past the opening credits: “Is this what you used to watch in the 70s?” they asked. E con questo abbiamo pressoché esaurito gli argomenti perché uno dei limiti del romanzo è che in primo piano non accade granché di rilevante e i personaggi senza eccezione appaiono stereotipi del conservatore rampante, dell’artista con tendenze gay, dell’anziano padre incapace di accettare una nuora di colore e così via. Per contro assumono un rilievo considerevole i fatti della famiglia reale, dall’incoronazione di Elisabetta al matrimonio di Carlo al funerale di Diana, vere e proprie cerimonie nazionali che trascinano l’intera popolazione e creano dolorose fratture ed insanabili incomprensioni anche fra tranquilli consanguinei. He had long toyed with the idea of writing a novel set during the week of Princess Diana’s funeral, but he wanted to take a longer view than he has in the past. The public reaction to the Queen’s death – in particular “the queue” – confirmed his growing belief “that we’re a nation mainly driven by emotion”, he says. Where he used to regard events such as the response to Diana’s death and the Brexit referendum as “turning points, moments when the country changed direction”, now he is not so sure. Instead, he sees them as “symptoms” of a national identity crisis that has been brewing for decades. “We are starting to look like a country that is not driven by facts and evidence and reason at all, but in the far extremes of Brexitland by a kind of fantasy and wishful thinking.” A tender portrayal of the state of the nation through the prism of family relationships * Woman & Home *